Some people advise you to find time to write by getting up an hour earlier or staying up an hour later, but this isn't a good idea if it leaves you short of sleep. In fact, it could actually make you less creative. As discussed in an article by Leslie Berlin in the New York Times, "Sleep enhances performance, learning, and memory. Most unappreciated of all, sleep improves creative ability to generate aha! moments and uncover novel connections among seemingly unrelated ideas."
Harvard Medical School researcher Dr. Jeffrey Ellenbogen has quantified it: you're 33% more likely to infer connections among distantly related ideas if an incubation period includes sleep. But when you have your aha! moment you won't necessarily know that sleep helped.
The moral of the story: instead of sleeping less, find something else you can do less (watching TV?) to make time to write.
(For more tips on how to be more creative, subscribe to my free monthly Brainstorm e-bulletin--it doesn't take long to read each issue! Just send an email request now to BstormUK@aol.com)
